Honeywell announces cloud API program for home automation software. Altadyn completely upends video conferencing market with super cheap pricing for product built on Google Hangouts. Plus: petroleum and gas time-series data now included in US Energy Information Administration API, Amazon's new subscription API, and 10 new APIs.

Honeywell Raises Temperature on its Wifi Thermostats with New API

Honeywell has announced its Comfort Control API to give consumers greater control over energy use in their homes. It is now in beta testing with four companies: Akuacom. Opower, Lutron Electronics and Control4.

According to the press release, the API is meant to control the company's Wi-Fi series of thermostats:

"The Comfort Control API is an effort by Honeywell to accelerate energy efficiency, innovation, and expand the seamless integration of products and services. "Honeywell subscribes to the belief that peoples' lives are made easier -- and better -- if devices and products talk to each other," said Tony Uttley, general manager home comfort and energy systems at Honeywell. "With the Comfort Control API, our thermostats will communicate with other apps and devices, which gives consumers a greater experience of convenience, control, an energy management within their home."

Altadyn Transforms Google Hangouts into WebConferencing

Altadyn has taken on the Goliaths of video confereincing with its Business Hangouts product, built on top of Google Hangouts

John Koetsier at Venturebeat says that pricing for this greaeasy to use product may well be the stone that fells the more expensive rivals:

..."this little-known company has the potential to shake up web video conferencing, because creating an account and starting small-scale videoconferences with up to 20 participants is free, does not require a credit card, and uses technology and processes almost all of us are already familiar with."

“It’s bridging the gap between traditional webinar platforms and Google Hangouts — which is very innovative, by far the most advanced technology, able to handle up to millions of simultaneous viewers — but which has been designed for Google+ for casual and informal hangouts,” [CEO Darius] Lahoutifard says.

The product is still in public beta, awaiting a freeze of the feature set once testing with a few thousand users is completed.

10 New APIs

Today we had 10 new APIs added to our API directory including a machine learning platform, an e-currency payment system, a browser sharing service, a toll-free number service, and a new york job search service. Below are more details on each of these new APIs.

EgoPay API: EgoPay is an e-currency that can be used to pay for goods and services online without having to provide sensitive credit card or bank details. Users can sign up for EgoPay for free without providing any personal information. The EgoPay API allows users to automatically send payments, get information on incoming and outgoing payments, obtain a history of transactions performed, or retrieve information about EgoPay accounts.

Firefly API: Firefly provides cobrowsing services, which allow customer representatives to connect with a customer's browser and show them features or fill out forms for them. Unlike screensharing, Firefly's cobrowsing only allows representatives to see what's on the customer's open web page and not their other active tabs or applications. This makes Firefly faster and much more secure than screensharing. Firefly's cobrowsing functions can be integrated with other applications via API.

Freedom800 API: Freedom800 is a cloud-based provider of toll-free numbers. The service is designed to help users create a professional image for their business without having to purchase an additional phone line. Freedom800 provides customizations for their service, such as changing automated greetings based on the time of day, allowing callers to enter information via keypad, providing confirmation numbers to callers who leave voicemail messages, and more.

Freedom800 provides a SOAP API for integration purposes. No public documentation is currently available for the API.

Hired in NY API: Hired in NY is a mobile app enabling users to discover, connect, and apply to jobs from New York based startups and tech companies. The application was originally built for NYC BigApps 2013.
The Hired in NY API provides free developer access to the application, supporting access to information on companies, jobs, and people. The API supports search through a variety of parameters. Results are JSON formatted.

InvisibleHand API: InvisibleHand is a browser add-on that automatically informs users when the product that they're shopping for is available at a lower price elsewhere. It also provides a link to the lowest-priced option. InvisibleHand can circumvent Minimum Advertised Prices (MAPs) in the U.S. by uncovering the real prices of products in cases where the price is too low to legally advertise.

The InvisibleHand API allows users to access the real-time prices for millions of products at hundreds of retailers. It is also capable of discovering where else a product is sold and retrieving product identifiers, such as UPCs, EANs, MPNs, ASINs and ISBNs.

Roll20 API: Roll20 is a web-hosted platform for tabletop games that allows groups of pen-and-paper gamers to play out campaigns entirely online. It provides text and video chats, player journals, turn tracking, dice rolling, background music, and a real-time shared graphical tabletop. Because Roll20 doesn't deal with game mechanics, it can be used with all kinds of tabletop games, including Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, Shadowrun, FATE, and many others. Roll20 is designed for ease of use and requires no downloads or installations.

The Roll20 API allows users to write pieces of JavaScript code that tell Roll20 what to do during gameplay. Some possible uses include moving pieces, adding status markers to tokens, or rolling dice.

stampr API: Stampr is a free letter mailing web service. Users simply submit a letter of five pages or less, and Stampr will print, fold, insert into an envelope, and send. Stampr prints in full color and works with any desktop application with a print button.
The Stampr API provides a RESTful interface for automating mailings. The supports the creation and control of letter batches as well as individual mailings. The API is designed to eventually support full customization, including options such as letter size, turnaround time, color values, and return envelopes.

Tinkercad API: Tinkercad is a web-based tool for creating digital designs for 3D printing. Designs created in Tinkercad are stored in the cloud, and users can easily share their models and fork other peoples' designs. Users can import 2D or 3D images into Tinkercad and treat them just like any other Tinkercad objects. Designs can be exported in a variety of formats, and Tinkercad is compatible with all 3D printers that accept the standard STL format. If users don't have their own 3D printer, they can print directly from Tinkercad using a third-party printing service.

Tinkercad provides a Shape Scripts interface, which allows users to create JavaScript programs to build 3D shapes that are capable of interacting with other shapes in Tinkercad.

Webmention.io API: Webmention.io is an API designed to keep track of webmentions and pingbacks, both of which are methods of letting the author of a webpage know who is linking back to their page. The Webmention.io API operates using calls in JavaScript and XML-RPC formats. The API is not currently open to sign-ups, but several of its functions are available without an account.

About the author:Greg Bates
A writer for Programmableweb since 2012, Greg is a freelance writer and a maniacal editor of dissertations and term papers. - Follow me on Google+

Comments(1)

We switched to Zoom http://zoom.us. It is a Google App, integrated with Google IM, Calendar and offers HD video and web conferencing for 25 people. It is very easy to use and has very useful features like recording, mobile screen sharing and best of it all, a RESTFUL API. We use the API to tie our backend web app.

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